Conservative college students battle liberal academia with new website

Conservative college students nationwide have banded together to launch a new website aimed at providing a platform for right-of-center students to freely express their political views. The College Conservative aims to give conservative college students nationwide, and eventually worldwide, “a place to get their voices heard.”

The site launches Monday with about 30 conservative university writers and editors. Editor Zachary Freeman, a student at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, told The Daily Caller the plan is publish three articles per weekday. The publication will work from a virtual newsroom instead of a formal meeting place; each contributor works from his or her respective college campus.

“My goal is to have a completely worldwide network of writers who are all for one unified cause,” Freeman said, adding that he already has one writer in Canada and is trying to lock down a British correspondent. “I mean unified with a cause, not just unified in some ridiculous protesting technique like Occupy Wall Street.

“This is a big deal. It’s not just us trying to get our way in one little area or take somebody down. This is a publication that will discuss the way that life is supposed to be.”

Freeman said the project came together after only about a month of planning. His fellow student journalists are “all ready to be leaders and just need a place to go,” he said. “That essentially the ultimate goal of this project: to create and prepare leaders for the upcoming generations so they can be heard in politics.”

UC San Diego senior Gabriella Hoffman, an assistant editor, told TheDC that she expects the site to host content from all corners of the conservative political landscape. “We’re going to try to encompass conservatives, libertarians, traditionalists, and everyone,” Hoffman said in a phone interview.

The idea of a political home base for conservative college students, she added, is something that she hasn’t seen before. The Huffington Post has something similar for liberal students, she said, and The College Fix acts as more of a “moderate” student publication. “We have never seen anything that’s exclusively ‘conservative and college,’” Hoffman said.

Some large universities, but not all, have conservative-leaning student media outlets that rival what some see as more liberal student newspapers. But no one, Hoffman adds, has successfully harnessed the energy of young conservative journalists in one place. “We’re trying to unify all of us together and create a kind of larger journal,” Hoffman said.

Freeman said one reason the project excites him is the opportunity it will provide for fellow conservative students to push back against liberal ideology they see in classroom instruction. One economics professor on his campus, he explained, “spent at least 10 minutes of every class claiming Fox News is wrong and Republicans are responsible for all of America’s financial problems.”

One exam question, he said, was: “Who was responsible for the 2007 financial meltdown?” He said the only answer the professor accepted for credit was: “Republicans.” Students who offered a different answer had their grades lowered.

Hoffman has had similar experiences. “In one class that I have currently, they argue that a big threat to national security is global warming,” she said. “That’s obviously an unfounded claim — there are thousands of scientists that have disproved any.”

“I’ve had some professors outright say that, if you’re Christian and you support traditional marriage, you’re a Nazi,” she adds.